Just over a year ago I received an email from the owner of The Founders Fund (who I will refer to as Jen) to come onboard as its exclusive investor and partner. The Founders Fund is a virtual accelerator program for women-identifying entrepreneurs that provides barrier free funding, community, education and more. I would become a champion for the organization, be part of mentoring the finalists, participate in media interviews and help build the profile of the Fund. I went on to loan $50,000 (non-equity, interest bearing) to the company to help launch its membership program and to bring on a full-time staff member as well as contractors to support with member experience, brand development, events, and more.

I was truly excited about this partnership and was keen to invest. Ever since being part of Dream, Girl, a documentary I produced about women-identifying founders in NYC, I had dreamed of formalizing a channel to invest in early-stage women-identifying founders to help kickstart and support their businesses and growth. Jen’s vision with the Fund, to create a legacy beyond her company Tease Tea, by helping founders get funded, became a vehicle I could support in order to fulfill my own dream.

It’s the same reason why a few months prior, I decided to come on board as the first external donor to the Fund when Jen was first pitching folks to join the grant-making program and I was compelled to match her $5,000 contribution for the first round. I remember her excitement and that call so clearly!

There was also another huge motivator for me to come on board. Kim Kirton was involved. Kim is someone whose work I had admired for sometime, and in the months prior we had the opportunity to connect and grow our friendship. She is someone who I know is meant to do great things in the world through her work and impact (I’d like to note that I am sharing this piece and the facts to follow with Kim’s permission).

It was my understanding that Kim was going to become cofounder of the Fund, and that she was on the path to becoming COO. Kim created and crafted the membership model of the Fund, and implemented the relationship building that happened with the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) and entrepreneurship communities in Toronto. She built the Fund’s early reputation through her own reputation and connections as a woman of colour. Kim and her team were responsible for generating close to $70,000 CAD in revenue for the Fund in its first membership drive last year. Noticing her initiative and skill, Kim and I started working together on small unrelated contracts as well (we continue to). It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I invested in the Fund because of Jen and Kim. Equal parts. That founding team felt solid to me with the information I had at the time. I knew it was a difficult road ahead to profitability for the business, and was willing to swallow the risk to help build the impact of the Fund.

Months later I would learn that Kim had continuously been misled and gaslit during her time building the Founders Fund.

Kim chose to leave the toxic environment and the organization as a result of prolonged gaslighting and manipulation and ended her contract. As she exited and after, she told Jen first hand about her experiences. Upon exiting, she was told to no longer promote or reference her work and contributions to the organization, at the request of the owner. Sometime later Jen emailed me warning me about working with Kim, effectively attempting to threaten Kim’s livelihood. I was floored.

In that e-mail, Jen was informing me of Kim’s exit with more details than necessary, and near the end wrote: “I am also sharing this with you because I ethically feel responsible for expressing my belief/opinion that based on this experience, and a recurring pattern Kim has working with others, to be cautious working with her.”

Jen sent this to me knowing I was a client of Kim’s and had been for many months. I took issue with Jen’s unsolicited advice that went beyond relevant details and called into question the character of a person I was already working with. Someone who’s work and leadership has remained exceptional in the near 2-years we have worked together. To me, it came across as a clear effort to discredit Kim and threaten her livelihood with a current client.

This interaction, and emails between Jen and I in the months that followed added further credence to Kim’s claims in my eyes. The lack of remorse or even acknowledgement of any wrongdoing towards Kim and the continued attempts to discredit her experiences to me and others was troubling and reflective of characteristics associated with gaslighters.

Kim’s ongoing experiences of gaslighting in the months prior to her exit, hit home for me as well (experiences that Kim may one day share).

I had experienced gaslighting when working with my cofounder on our documentary, Dream, Girl in 2016. We premiered the film at the Obama White House, and had so many major public milestones, but behind the scenes I was physically unwell (I faced a cancer diagnosis and a neurological illness and subsequent recoveries), and didn’t realize that I was experiencing gaslighting that led to further emotional and psychological damage. From having the funding I brought to the table for the company erased from our public narrative, to being intimidated and marginalized within our relationship, and having my illnesses used against me, my experiences with DG changed me in harmful ways.

I left DG and Brooklyn in January 2017, confused, lost, sick, and broken. It took me over a year alongside interventions from mental health professionals, to realize and name what happened to me. I had been gaslit for almost two years.

The thing about working with people who gaslight (for both Kim and I, it happened to be white women-identifying feminists we were working with) — is that so much of your identity, self-worth, confidence in your work, and sense of self get broken down to the point that when you choose to leave (or are forced to leave) you no longer recognize yourself and what the future looks like. The psychological impacts leave you feeling like a shell of yourself. So much of your identity and energy is diminished by the person, the situation, the company — especially in impact-driven spaces. The gaslighter’s sense of “a greater cause” often supersedes basic decency, boundaries, and the humanity of the BIPOC involved.

When I came to learn what happened to Kim back in March, it felt all too familiar and I believed her. Through emails and actions, I witnessed Jen’s reluctance to reckon with or acknowledge any of the alleged wrong doing. That reluctance affirmed for me that a sincere resolution and reconciliation was not probable as is often the case in instances of gaslighting.

We have a responsibility to believe BIWOC (Black, Indigenous, Women of Colour), especially when imbalanced power dynamics are at play and advocate for them in the ways that we can. It is our job to speak up and out, and to call for accountability.

In the months that followed, I decided to decouple myself from the Fund after realizing that private conversations were ineffective with Jen, and with a repayment plan finalized, I asked to no longer be publicly associated with the Fund. This was at a time when the leadership and staffing of the company was changing to include other BIWOC.

Knowing the origins of how the company was built, I did not want my name, likeness and reputation to continue to be associated with a company that at its core did not embody the principles and values that were outlined to me at the outset and that were purported publicly. A few weeks ago, Jen was on Dragon’s Den and erased critical elements of the founding story of the Fund on national television (I acknowledge that editors are always involved and the segments are short, but the Fund didn’t just ‘blow up’. Kim, an uncredited woman of colour, and her team strategized, and implemented the ‘blow up’ with Jen).

My intention with sharing this is to share Kim’s story and call for accountability.

The Founders Fund will continue to grow. It will continue to be a space for early-stage founders and those who dream of creating their businesses to learn and grow. It will continue to be an important vessel for women-identifying founders across Canada. Jen will continue to do good work in the world through this organization and elsewhere. But, in order for the Fund’s mission to truly align with the reality of its workplace, Jen and the team must reckon with what it truly means to run an inclusive and intersectional national impact-organization.

What this might look like:

• The establishment of an annual grant or fund specifically for BIWOC of a minimum of $5,000 created in honour of Kim and her team’s work.
• The establishment of an advisory board made up of BIPOC, disabled, and systemically marginalized individuals to ensure the organization becomes inclusive and goes beyond virtue-signalling and towards true reckoning and inclusion
• Working with diversity, equity, and inclusion advisors to transform the daily operations and culture of the company (they recently began working with someone to do so)
• The addition of Kim’s name into the organization’s founding narrative publicly and providing her the title of cofounder

We must share these stories, and use our positions of power to ensure accountability and change. Staying silent and enabling white women-identifying founders in impact spaces (and otherwise) to continue to belittle, gaslight, and erase BIWOC is unacceptable.

I am speaking up now in the way I wish someone would have spoken up for me when I was gaslit in a company I helped build.

As the Founders Fund grows its membership base and brings on its new investor, I ask that those joining the organization hold the company accountable to its mission of empowerment. I hope it becomes an organization that can treat and prioritize the BIWOC on its staff the way it purports to treat and prioritize those in its membership. As members or funders, ensure you ask for real transformation and evidence of that transformation.

Note: To respect and honour Kim’s energy both as a full-time entrepreneur and her lived experiences as a BIWOC she asks that others refrain from messaging her about this directly. She is being mindful of her energy and is hoping to share about this specific experience in her own words when the timing feels right for her. In the meantime Kim has provided her consent for this post, as she recognizes the importance of transparency and accountability that is needed in order to see the changes we want to see in our everyday systems and organizations that we live and work in daily, also noting that the power dynamics have made it such that she hasn’t felt safe to share her story publicly up to this point.

Additional note: I’ve made edits to add more details about my interactions directly with Jen, and to add links to research about gaslighting. This is hosted on my personal Medium blog, and I did not write this piece as a journalist, but rather from my own personal experience and Kim’s personal experience (with permission) over the last three months.

The women of Dream, Girl are, decidedly, dreamers. They’re entrepreneurs, gurus, role models, and examples of what it looks like to do the work, shaking up the traditionally exclusive world of entrepreneurship.

“The only way I can describe myself is as a dreamer,” says Komal Minhas, Dream, Girlproducer and founder of KoMedia. “I am most definitely a dreamer. Do I dream when I sleep? No, I like to dream when I’m awake and I can turn those dreams into some sort of trajectory for a goal or something that I can put into action.”

But for all our big dreaming, and even though we’re starting companies at rates three times higher than, women’s companies are statistically on the smaller side. When women’s businesses do make it to high-growth levels, they tend to bring in better returns than the male-led businesses in the same category, but most women-led firms don’t make it past revenues of $500,000 per year.

What those statistics combined tell us is that, while it’s discouraging that women’s companies aren’t as high-growth as men’s are, we’re ready for them to be. Women’s success rates once we make it to the Fortune 1000 say we’re ready. Studies that find women are better leaders “at every level” than men are and surveys that find organizational cultures change for the better when women are involved say we’re ready. Research showing that corporations with female leaders are 25 percent more charitable says we’re ready.

And yet, female entrepreneurs get just 2.7 percent of all investment capital, take smaller salaries than men do, are still underrepresented in STEM, and operate in corporate culture that doesn’t quite know what to do with the fact that women have and raise children.

But those are the reasons why this moment in history so important. There are still roadblocks female entrepreneurs experience that our male counterparts don’t, but it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of challenging the status quo in really meaningful ways.

We’re having real conversations about what it means to be a woman of color entrepreneur. We’re facing self-sabotage head-on and finally counting self-care as an integral part of achieving meaningful success. We’re confronting messages we received as children about talking about money and whether it’s ‘polite’ for women to brag. We’re having bigger conversations about the effect Hollywood and the media we consume have on women’s dreams. We’re embracing feminism in business and celebrating women who support other women.

So where do we go from here? How do we keep this momentum going?

For one, we need to continue to explore and understand the power of women. “Women are our most under-utilized resource and I feel like it’s up to us to take care of each other. It’s up to us to look and see what the needs are, and to reach out and to fill those holes. It’s like we can’t wait for anyone else — we are the answer,” Marie says.

But we need help, too. It’s important to keep thinking about what it means to be an ally to feminist and female entrepreneurs’ movements — how white women can use privilege to uplift women of colour, and how men can use their positions of power to make space for women and people of colour to excel.

“I’m a big advocate for fairness,” says William Crowder, an investor with Comcast’s Catalyst Fund. “And hopefully I’m open minded enough that I create avenues for other people whether it be women, people of colour, just people in general — that these things don’t matter anymore, that it’s just a conversation between an investor and an entrepreneur, and if everything that you say I like and everything I say you like, we decide we’re going to do this together and that’s the end of the story.”

Until we reach that point, we’ll leave you with Natalia Oberti Noguera’s advice: “WWASWGD. What would a straight white guy do? I give that motto whenever I’m talking to women and people of colour, whether it’s professionals or entrepreneurs, that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what that straight white guy does. It’s just more a way to take oneself out of the moment and just think about — what would you do if you were coming from a place of abundance? What would you do if you were coming from a place of privilege?”

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get our next series, in which we’ll be tacking an entirely new but equally important topic (launching next week!), straight to your inbox Tuesdays at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.

At just 27 years old, Komal Minhas is a business-owner and the producer of a feature documentary. Her secret? Along with a lot of hard work, it’s recognizing self-sabotage and stopping it in its tracks.

“The hardest part about starting my business was the self-sabotage, because I truly believe that if we are in love with ourselves and if we want to be our best friends, that is a true path to success,” she says. “Demons only get into our head if we let them.”

Self-sabotage can take many forms, but social science researchers agree that the end subconscious result is to avoid potential failure by creating conditions that prevent success. In other words, our subconscious is saying: ‘I might not succeed at this thing I really want, so I’m going to manufacture something I can blame that failure on.’

Take procrastination as an example. While some see it as plain and simple laziness, it’s actually a very common self-sabotage tactic. It’s easier to internally justify failure if we do something rushed and last minute than if we invest a lot of time and effort and it doesn’t pay off.

Fending off this kind of thinking is a lifelong process, and it’s one that many successful women really struggle with.

Why? Societal messages about how successful women can be — or should want to be — find their way into our subconscious minds. One study found that self-sabotaging women all had one thing in common: the messages they received from their parents in childhood, subliminally telling them how high (or low) to aim in their future careers.

Since the 70’s and 80’s, researchers have been referring to women’s ‘fear of success’, and while times certainly have changed, there’s always more work to do. So many of us experience self-sabotage, and the way to not let the cycle take over is to eliminate the shame surrounding it.

That’s why we need open and honest discussions with successful female entrepreneurs about how they broke the cycle. It’s the kind of discussion you can expect from Dream, Girl.

“I think what women have a tendency to do which makes it more pronounced and self sabotaging is the process of rumination that keeps us moving in a downward spiral, and stuck in negative thought patterns, that in fact stop us from taking the next positive right action… It is a vicious circle that we only get out of when we learn tools to build our confidence, check our mind-sets, and turn our thoughts into action,” says Megan Dalla-Camina.

Megan has devoted her career to advancing the female economy, as a business and leadership coach and author of Getting Real About Having It All.

And she’s not the only one talking about self-sabotage. Life coach and hugely popular web TV host (and a Dream, Girl-featured entrepreneur), Marie Forleo often talks about a similar concept. She refers to it as an ‘upper limit problem.’

It’s a term coined by psychologist and author Gay Hendricks, who says each one of us has an internal limit on how much success and happiness we think we deserve or can handle, so when we start to approach that limit, we often self-sabotage.

“If you did make a commitment to fully using your unique gifts, you might fail. This belief tells you to play it safe and stay small. That way, if you fail, at least you fail small,” Hendricks writes.

It’s similar to another mental block gaining a lot of attention lately: impostor syndrome. It’s this internal voice, very common in women but men experience it too, telling a person that they’re a fraud, that their accomplishments have been due to luck or happenstance rather than hard work, and everyone could find out at any moment. It’s yet another way women are conditioned to internally block or discredit our successes.

So how do we break the cycle?

“Understanding that we are not our thoughts is a good place to start,” says Megan.

“We have between sixty- and eighty-thousand thoughts a day, and we are constantly telling ourselves stories about who we are, what we think about ourselves, what we can and can’t do and all of our self limiting beliefs. These are some of the biggest internal barriers to overcome, because if we get to the point where we can catch our stories, challenge them by asking ourselves ‘is that true?’ and reframing our response into a thought, that leads to positive action,” she says.

One of Komal’s personal mantras comes from activist and author Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Female entrepreneurs are powerful beyond measure, and we only stand to build on that power by working to fulfil our potential.

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get these articles straight to your inbox Tuesday’s at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.

At a time when North America seems to be fixated on whether or not women can manage to be mothers and have successful careers simultaneously (and, yes, we’re talking about 2018, not 1950), Amanda Goetz did things a little differently than most: she founded a start-up when she was pregnant.

“I wasn’t planning on not going back (to work) after my maternity leave. I always figured I need the money. We’re in NYC — there’s no way we can live off of one income,” she says. “But there was something inside of me other than a baby. There was something inside of me that was really pushing me to do this and it’s that spark that every entrepreneur has.”

That was when she founded Availendar, a social scheduling app used for event planning that allows vendors, like venues or party supply rental companies, to share availability and sync their own calendars accordingly. Amanda has now moved on to head up marketing for XO Group, a wedding brand and online marketing platform.

It was “a full juggling act,” working from home, running the startup full-time while also taking care of her daughter. She doesn’t stick to a strict schedule, instead taking on each day’s challenges as they come.

Research shows that both family friendly policies benefit businesses and their employers, with these policies linked to “reductions in staff turnover, recruitment and training costs and absenteeism, and (an) increased likelihood that mothers return to work after maternity leave.”

Australian company AMP estimates a 400 percent return on investment since implementing family-friendly policies.

And while others are beginning to catch on — with Netflix announcing in August a new policy of up to a year’s worth parental leave for new moms and dads — they’re still exception to the rule. America is the only developed country in the world that doesn’t provide nationally mandated paid parental leave and corporations are slow to fill the gap.

And since women in North America still hold primary responsibility for childcare, we’re often the ones leaving the corporate world permanently, or worse, not being hired in the first place because of the possibility that having and raising children could interfere.

Women are also the ones who all too often feel as though we need to hide our family lives, says Sara Margulis, the founder of Honeyfund and Plumfund.

“There were times when I was on a conference call with some of my staff, and my kids are in the backseat, and I’m telling them to be quiet,” Margulis says. “Stuff like that, that I think all women do because we feel pressure to be professional to not be distracted by your kids.”

Canadian investor and Dragon’s Den star Kevin O’Leary invests in both companies. After O’Leary came out in support of women-led companies — with the revelation that of all his portfolio investments, the only ones making him any money are the ones run by women — in May, Margulis wrote a Huffington Post article titled “Five Secrets I’d Never Tell Kevin O’Leary… Until Now.”

Her secrets, among a few others, were that she leaves the office most days at 3pm to pick up her kids; she takes most Fridays off (“and will until next fall when my youngest starts Kindergarten”); and that she never misses “a school play, talent show, or ceremony.”

In other words, she’s a mom and she’s not ashamed of it — and she’s actively created a corporate culture where women don’t need to worry that they’ll be taken less seriously for acknowledging that they have kids.

Of course, the long term systemic solution is to work toward men and women sharing the social burden for childcare. And new research is showing that it may be as simple as leading by example: daughters of working women statistically earn more than their counterparts, and sons grow up to contribute more in household chores.

Amanda keeps this goal in mind: “To feel like I am setting an example for (my daughter), that she’s seeing her mom at a very young age lead calls of tech teams and going to investor meetings and practice pitches. I really hope that growing up she’s going to be like, ‘I can do whatever I want to do. My mom was doing this while living in 450 square feet in NYC.’”

And at the rate women are starting businesses today, what’s really promising is that female entrepreneurs’ ability to shape our own corporate cultures means we’re perfectly positioned to be catalysts for a major cultural shift.

Let’s make it happen.

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get these articles straight to your inbox Tuesday’s at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.

It’s hard to believe that when Anna Holmes started Jezebel, a website with a readership of more than 13 million people per month, some had doubts.

“I do recall a somebody, I don’t remember who it was, saying ‘I don’t think you should talk about feminism on the site,’” she says. “I just kind of smiled and said ok, but was thinking, ‘I will talk about whatever I want.’”

Because the idea of not talking about feminism was completely counter to what Jezebel does. It’s a women’s magazine for women who hate women’s magazines, a haven for those of us who are unabashedly addicted to pop culture but can’t turn off our feminist brains long enough to read another article about how some celebrity woman hasn’t restored her pre-baby body fast enough.

So, while working for Gawker in 2007 and noticing that its female readers wanted more than the media market could offer them at the time, Anna founded Jezebel as a Gawker blog.

Since then, Jezebel has taken off and the world of popular feminist media has diversified, from feminist pop culture criticism like Jezebel and Bitch to Vice’s new women’s vertical, Broadly — to Dream, Girl director Erin Bagwell’s first venture, Feminist Wednesday, which profiles inspiring feminists every Wednesday.

“I really think these outlets bring to life the experiences we share as women, as feminists. They allow for communities to be formed, women to support other women, men to engage in feminism, and for women to know they’re not alone,” says Alicia Napierkowski, Editor in Chief of Feminist Wednesday.

“These are places we can all meet up and share our stories, thoughts, and opinions. They’re safe houses and encouragers of self-expression, inspiration, and change. The things we think are so taboo are actually not at all, and that’s something we all need: rapport, and support.”

It’s hard to know what came first: the steady increase in popularity and accessibility of feminist media or the mass public embracing of the term feminist — perhaps the most famous example of which being Beyonce’s own neon statement.

But with feminism’s shift into the mainstream has come what some call the rise of ‘corporate feminism’ — and the argument that feminism and capitalism are inherently incompatible.

And to be fair, some recent developments haven’t exactly disproved this theory. For instance, when Apple and Facebook recently announced they would pay for female employees’ eggs to be frozen so they could focus on their careers for longer, feminists questioned what kind of message this sent to women in the corporate world — namely that having a family and climbing the corporate ladder aren’t compatible, and, perhaps most heartbreakingly, that companies see women only in terms of their productivity and not as whole people who deserve to have lives outside of work.

But it’s also worth noting that Apple and Facebook both have some of the most progressiveparental leave policies in corporate America.

And while it’s true that traditional ways of doing business can often exclude women who are systemically disadvantaged — women of colour, LGBTQ women, women with disabilities — more and more women-led companies are changing this narrative.

In fact, we already know that companies with women on boards tend to equal better corporate social responsibility, but another welcome effect of their presence is diversified hiring.

Take Intel for example — earlier this year, the company announced a $300 million investment in diversity, with new training and recruiting initiatives to to add more women and people of colour to the team.

And the woman behind the shift? Intel President, Renee James, who holds the highest-ranked position of any woman in the company’s history.

So while traditionally, the corporate world has often disenfranchised women and minorities, it’s safe to say that the introduction of corporate feminism has begun to shake up this norm. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s a start.

And no matter what your feminism looks like, how you choose to express it, it’s hard to deny that the movement has transformed so many women’s lives.

“It’s mind-blowing to reflect on my experiences and realize that I, one person, have been so incredibly influenced by where feminism has taken me, to Feminist Wednesday and Dream, Girl,” says Alivia, “and that when Dream, Girl is released, it will be multiplied by millions and change the lives of that many other girls who have been searching for the encouragement to fulfill their dreams.”

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get these articles straight to your inbox Tuesday’s at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.

Suzanne West is a pioneer in the energy sector. After spending years working for big oil companies and feeling like her voice wasn’t being heard, she “busted open her piggy banks” and started her own company, Imaginea.

Imaginea is an oil extraction and energy company that operates on triple bottom lineprinciples: people, planet and profit. While skeptics might argue the three can’t live in harmony, and certainly not in the oil industry, Suzanne has made it her mission to change that narrative.

“In my industry, you’re kind of relegated to pick: You’re either a crazy tree hugger or a greedy capitalist,” she says, “and as an entrepreneur… I am sort of all of a sudden going, ‘Hang on, we are missing an enormous amount of opportunity, which is this beautiful space in between.’”

Suzanne brought in 300 million dollars in investment for Imaginea, and she uses that capital to bring to life innovative and sustainable energy solutions. For instance, Imaginea is currently developing a technology that converts the gas coming from flare stacks at industrial plants into energy — creating an on-site energy supply.

All it takes to cultivate this kind of innovation is the courage to look at the world’s problems in a new light, and that’s exactly what Suzanne does.

While it’s true that the traditional way of operating in the energy industry has created global environmental and social conditions that can decrease standard of living, Suzanne maintains that energy is a critical factor in improving day-to-day quality of life.

“Energy is 30 percent of standard of living. It’s actually part of the solution,” she says.

Suzanne is one of thousands of women who are leading the global social entrepreneurship movement. They’re women who understand that it’s not an either-or equation: They can do good and make a lot of money doing it.

In the UK, for instance, a national survey found that women are leading 38 percent of social enterprises — compared to 19 percent of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and 3 percent of large companies. And only 9 percent of social enterprises have male-only leadership teams, compared to 49 percent of mainstream SMEs.

Social enterprise is a newer, more nuanced business model that recognizes that profit and social service can and do go hand-in-hand — but it’s also firm in the belief that profit should not be more important than the people behind it.

It’s a model that challenges internal conflicts women often have about being paid for things they’re really passionate about — which is that it somehow makes us, in the words of Marie Forleo, “less spiritual, less soulful, less authentic.” Women like Marie at the forefront of the social entrepreneurship movement are actively challenging this narrative.

They’re women like Jane Chen, who, along with Dream, Girl director Erin Bagwell, is a front-woman for Clinique’s new Smart Ideas campaign.

Jane founded Embrace Innovations, a social enterprise that started as a class project at Stanford University. Jane came up with the idea for an infant warmer to treat premature and underweight babies — and help prevent high rates of infant mortality — in developing countries. The Embrace Infant Warmer costs less than 1 percent of traditional incubators. Since then, Embrace has evolved into an enterprise that develops many different strategies to promote maternal and infant health.

And not only are women leading the social entrepreneurship charge, studies also show that our presence on the boards of companies that don’t have explicitly social mandates translates to better social responsibility records.

A study by Catalyst and the Harvard Business School found that companies with 25 percent more women corporate officers made charitable donations that were 13 times higher than companies with no women corporate officers.

And just to drive the point home further: “For each percentage point increase in women corporate officers, yearly donations increased by 5.7 million dollars.”

Another study done in 2010 found that companies with women on their corporate boards were more likely to engage in community involvement — sponsoring or creating organizations that benefit their surrounding communities.

The researchers make no mistake about it: “The effects of social responsibility on employees, public image, and surrounding communities are far-reaching, and many companies look for any available advantage in these areas. By bringing women on their boards, companies can open up a world of opportunities and advantages.”

And while it’s revolutionary that companies are starting to take notice of the correlation between women’s leadership and social good, what’s even more inspiring is that there are so many women like Suzanne West and Jane Chen who aren’t waiting to be brought onto corporate boards.

They’re starting the companies that will change the world on their own terms.

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get these articles straight to your inbox Tuesday’s at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.

Marie Forleo gives great advice. In fact, she’s made a career out of it: her web series Marie TV is hugely popular among female entrepreneurs and those who dream of one day starting a business.

Through hundreds of MarieTV episodes, she teaches her viewers how to create and maintain successful businesses. A big part of that, of course, is money, and she has a strong message for businesswomen: don’t be afraid of it.

She says women can often be reluctant to ask for money, whether that’s in salary negotiations, pitching to investors, or taking a salary from their business. But it’s time to change that.

“Part of us wants more (money), and part of us feels guilty or greedy for wanting it. And like we’re bad or somehow that makes us, I don’t know, less spiritual, less soulful, less authentic, and I think that’s total BS,” says Marie.

“I think money is amazing. It is the most incredible tool that you can use, not only to take care of yourself and your family, but more importantly that you can funnel to ideas and causes and real problems in this world that take resources to help fix.”

This disconnect is reminiscent of what we often hear about the wage gap, which is that women simply don’t ask for as much money as men do. And to some extent, this is true: Linda Babock, the author of Women Don’t Ask surveyed a group of MBA men and women and found that 57 percent of men negotiated their salary when starting a new job, while only 7 percent of women did. Yikes.

But the problem with this narrative is that it often stops there. Rarely do we see anyone seek to understand the reasons women don’t ask. It’s often implied that women are to blame, when the problem is much more systemic than that.

“It is certainly true that some women don’t ask. And it is equally true that many women do ask, but unfortunately the reception that they get when they do ask may not be the same as men in a similar situation,” says Carol Frohlinger, president of Negotiating Women, Inc. and co-author of Her Place at the Table: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership.

Carol says the problem starts with the preconceived notions both men and women have of women as passive non-negotiators, which means that when a woman does negotiate there can be backlash.

“It might be that a woman who asks and doesn’t do so in a very careful way can actually get dinged for asking, can be considered high maintenance, difficult to work with. So it can then put her in a situation where she says to herself, ‘Hell no, I tried that the last time. I’m not doing that again,’” says Carol.

But does the problem really affect female entrepreneurs? Isn’t it avoided altogether when a woman writes her own paycheck?

Unfortunately, no. Not yet.

A 2014 study found that the average female CEO of a social enterprise pays herself 23 percent less than the average male CEO — which is about in line with corporate America’s pay gap.

The good news is the women surveyed showed higher job satisfaction than their male counterparts. But at what cost — literally?

Of course, there are variables here. For instance, on average, women tend to lean toward socially motivated (read: often less profitable) businesses, which obviously means less takeaway for the CEO. But it also comes down to what women personally believe our time, effort, and skill are worth.

Carol says the research backs this up: “The difference is, when you look at the research on women negotiating for others the outcome is as good, if not better, than men. It’s just when we negotiate for ourselves.”

And not only do women grapple with feelings of inadequacy, we also have to navigate long-held notions that women should be selfless at all costs, when in reality, a number of studiesshow that if we can’t take care of ourselves adequately — which very often requires spending money on ourselves — our ability to take care of others declines sharply.

The problem, like many other gender divides, can also be traced in part back to some of the ways girls and boys are raised differently, says Carol.

“Many women are given the message from childhood that it’s not nice to talk about money.”

Marie says the key to overcoming this is to just be open and willing to deconstruct this kind of conditioning.

“I think as women, we can’t shy away from money,” says Marie. “We’ve got to really dive into it and be willing to swim around and investigate all the places that we have screwed up beliefs. And that’s okay. All of us have screwed up beliefs about something, but with money it’s like we’ve got to get this straight. It’s vital.”

It’s vital and it’s totally doable. The first step is starting the money conversation.

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get these articles straight to your inbox Tuesday’s at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.

Janet Lustgarten is the CEO and co-founder of Kx Systems, a data analysis company. Her everyday work deals very much in the logical, analytical, technical realms.

Her secret to success is decidedly less quantifiable.

“The people who do well are the people who find love,” she says. “Love from other people in their surroundings — whomever, whatever. And that is such a message to be talking about. I’m a computer scientist and we’re talking about something very intellectual… and then I turn into a conversation about love.”

Love and vulnerability are languages women are socialized to know well, but they’re not usually part of the conversation in business. Some experts say it’s time to change that.

And those in the business world are starting to realize that traditionally feminine ways of doing things are not weaknesses, have never been, and in fact can mean stronger business decisions and ultimately better returns.

Take Sara Margulis as an example: she runs two companies — Honeyfund and Plumfund, both crowd-gifting platforms that allow people to contribute money to their friends’ honeymoons, important life events, and even charity causes. Last year, Sara wrote a blog post listing the five things she’d never tell her investors.

Number four on her list was: “I cried at work last week.”

When we asked why, she shared: “The particular thing I cried about that day was a campaign we’re running on Plumfund for a man that lived in Fukushima, Japan in a radioactive zone, taking care of the animals that were abandoned there… and we sent him an email saying that we’d made the first wire transfer to him, $5,000, and his response was just so simple and so moving. He just said, ‘Thank you very much. All of this money will go to feed the cows.’”

It’s that kind of vulnerability that propels her business.

“Just having that direct connection to see the results of all of our efforts to grow a company that does good for people and makes giving feel good was really moving,” she says. “So of course that involves emotions. That involves joy, and sharing a hope and high-fiving when you get there.”

It’s Sara’s full understanding of what it means — what it feels like — to give, and sharing that understanding with her customers, that makes her businesses a success.

We often hear that women’s emotions are their points of weakness. Implicit in this message is that they don’t make good leaders, because leaders shouldn’t show their emotions — and certainly not at work.

Recently, though, the idea that women are too emotional to be good business-owners is being overturned by research that shows emotional intelligence is integral to running a great company.

The emerging research shows that, on average, women have slightly higher emotional competency scores than men do. This means that they’re often more tuned in to their own emotions, other people’s emotions, and how to leverage both into success.

Women are, on average, 45% more likely to be seen as (AKA their colleagues and peers perceive them as) showing empathy consistently. Women are also a whole 86% more likely than men to be seen as demonstrating emotional self-awareness on a consistent basis.

Anabel Jenson is the president of Six Seconds, a non-profit that promotes emotional intelligence. She signs her emails with “xo.”

Anabel says women can definitely use their emotional intelligence as an asset in business, but she doesn’t think it’s an inherent female trait. Instead, she says, like most other ‘gendered’ traits, women are socialized so that they’re able to express their emotions more eloquently.

Regardless, the advantage is there: women are very often well positioned to use their emotional intelligence to make better, smarter business decisions.

Anabel says the main component of emotional intelligence that can influence everything from better leadership to smarter business decisions to more effective design is empathy. She uses the example of the Stanford design school, where empathy is actually built into the lesson plan.

“The important thing, before you invent something, is to practice empathy. So the first thing you do when you think you have a wonderful new idea about, let’s say, a better grocery cart, what you need to do is have several conversations with people who use grocery carts. What would they like to change about the grocery cart? What would they find more convenient? … So the whole idea is that you have to put yourself in the other person’s position.”

Sara adds that this kind of awareness has allowed her to make more authentic connections with her clients.

“When we communicate with our customers, we just try to be real people. People are emotionally intelligent. We read each other’s emotions without even thinking about it every day, and when that’s lacking in a customer relationship, it leaves your customer feeling like a number or like a dollar sign — and not like a person.”

Sara hasn’t always felt comfortable being vulnerable, but she’s since accepted that the way she does business works, and it works well.

“I don’t have to hide anything — I’m doing a good job. And this is how a lot of people are getting it done, so why should we hide? Why should we be ashamed of it?”

The bottom line is this: women make money, even if — and perhaps especially when — they cry at work.

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get these articles straight to your inbox Tuesday’s at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.

William Crowder has a few key questions for his fellow investors:

“Who would you rather have running a company? Would you rather have someone who feels like this is something they can just do and it comes natural and they’re not really pushing very hard? Or would you like to work with someone who’s got a drive and a passion to succeed that is somewhat unmatched, relative to some of the other people in the space?”

To be clear, the ones who have the unmatched passion and drive are women.

And William would know — he’s leads the Catalyst Fund, a division of Comcast Ventures that funds minority and women-led ventures. The Fund’s motto is, “In a sea of sameness, we value different.”

So William knows that when we invest in women, amazing things happen.

“The women that I’ve invested in have been incredibly impressive,” he says. “They know their spaces cold, inside and out, there’s no question. I have a couple that I feel like no matter who they’re meeting with, they are the smartest person in the room.”

And William’s experiences are backed by the numbers. Not only are women-owned businesses increasing in number, they’re increasing in size and strength, too.

A 2013 study called Women in Technology: Evolving, Ready to Save the Worldfound that women-led startups achieve on average a 35 percent higher return on investment than male-owned companies. And when they’re venture-backed, they bring in 12 percent more revenue than their male counterparts.

And in March 2015, another confirmation: a study of 1,000 Fortune companies found that women-led companies perform three times better than those run by men — equity returns 226 percent better, to be exact.

So what is it that makes women more likely to succeed in this way?

William says it has a lot to do with the fact that to even become a leader and carve out a space in the business world for themselves, women often have to put in more work than their male counterparts just to level the playing field.

“I think that whenever people are put in a position where they feel like they have something else to prove, or they’ve had to work so hard just to get whatever it is that they have to begin with, then they’re far less likely to just let it all ride and go away,” he says.

A survey by the Pew Research Centre might just prove that point. It found that the number one reason people thought that women were being held back from top executive jobs is that they’re held to higher standards than men are.

So it could be that by the time women get to that top job or are ready to start their business, they’re already accustomed to working harder than everyone else. It’s an unfortunate reality — and one that we need to work toward changing — but one that, for better or worse, makes women a force to be reckoned with in the business world.

We also know that part of the reason is likely because women are socialized to be better tuned into the inner workings of the people around them, including their employees and their clients, making them more effective leaders.

Two Harvard researchers found in 2012 that “at every level, more women were rated by their peers, their bosses, their direct reports, and their other associates as better overall leaders than their male counterparts — and the higher the level, the wider that gap grows.”

And not only are we more tuned in emotionally, women are statistically more likely to work collaboratively and consider others’ ideas in decision making environments.

In a 2010 survey of 50 female corporate board members, there was an overwhelming consensus that the whole culture of an organization changes when more women have meaningful roles.

One of the study’s respondents was on a board that went from having two to four women directors said there was a noticeable culture shift after adding more women to the mix: “The men are learning to be more inclusive, asking whether anyone has comments, and so on.”

Another had this to say: “People talk differently now that there are more women… it’s much more conversational and less hierarchical and, as a result, all the directors get better information.”

Collaboration matters because any good leader knows that in order to get the best results, monetary and otherwise, every talent pool needs to be tapped. No one person has all the answers, and women know this — that’s why they, statistically, get better results when they’re in charge of a company.

So whether we’re making strides in changing corporate culture, or we’re having to work twice as hard as men to just to prove our capability, the reality is that businesses led by women are more likely to succeed.

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get these articles straight to your inbox Tuesday’s at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.

Adam Quinton does one of the most important things in feminist allyship: He uses his position of power to challenge the very structures that helped him get to that position. Case in point: his thoughts on corporate culture.

“Any really, really big company is, for good or bad, locked into a culture typically born of a lot of history,” he says.

And when the history of corporate America has been largely male, that can have ramifications for what corporate culture looks like today and its future development or potential for change.

Adam remembers one particular lunch with a few colleagues, three of them men and one woman. “I realized that we were just talking about football,” he says. “Now, our female colleague may have been quite interested in football, I don’t know, but unless you’re careful, that’s just an example how the comfort zone could become very comfortable, and you’re immediately, in a very, on the one hand, trivial way because we’re just talking about football, but you’re excluding that person.”

It’s the kind of everyday interaction that happens often enough to build powerful yet discreet systems that can make women feel uncomfortable at best — and unwelcome at worst. The problem is you might never notice or understand the unique and often nebulous feeling unless you’re a woman who’s found herself in this kind of environment.

A 2013 report found that women cite ‘male’ corporate culture as the biggest roadblock in advancing at any particular company. More than half of those surveyed also said “they believe today’s cultures are dramatically reducing the length of time women are prepared to stay and develop their career with their employer.”

The good news is that women aren’t about to accept that as the status quo.

“Although women are underrepresented in C-level and VP-level roles, they are disproportionately creating entire marketing, sales, human resources and customer service strategies grounded in social connectivity,” writes Nicole Alvino, co-founder and senior vice president at SocialChorus. “I believe women are transforming corporate culture on an unprecedented scale. The results will redefine our notions of leadership for years to come and recreate brands as a source of community and inspiration, not just profit, products and employment.”

But they’re up against a lot, a history of corporate culture stacked against them. “The entire corporate system is founded on patriarchy,” says Lisa Jackson, co-founder of Corporate Culture Pros.

And one of the ways that system is maintained is through corporations’ insistence on super-strict hierarchies, systems that Lisa says women have not been socialized to respond as well to as their male counterparts, instead favouring more collaborative methods.

“Because female-oriented leadership tends to naturally lend itself to teamwork, ambiguity, and collaboration, changing organizational structures to unleash these skills will likely mean women will more naturally succeed — not 100% but more likely,” she says.

There are some companies experimenting with shaking up hierarchy, though. Zapposmade headlines when it ditched management systems altogether in 2013. Now, no one at the company holds a manager title. Instead, everyone on the team works together in a ‘holacracy’, a system that “takes powers traditionally reserved for executives and managers and spreads them to all employees.”

And they’re not the only company doing things differently. “Netflix has eliminated performance reviews — a somewhat subtle but powerful ‘masculine’ practice that suggests the feedback process is driven by the boss’s perceptions, versus an interactive discussion,” Lisa says.

And while it would be great every big company would take a hard look at and completely overhaul its corporate culture, it doesn’t always need to be so drastic. Lisa says it can be as simple as wording, making sure company guidelines include and value different types of leadership.

“If you are in HR, support your company to define leadership and success in broader terms that include teamwork, collaboration and learning. Women will more naturally rise to fill these roles if these qualities are valued and rewarded,” she says.

And the fact that more and more women are taking on outdated corporate culture and making meaningful changes is incredibly encouraging.

Who needs all the CEO positions when we’re staging a revolution from within?

Thanks for tuning in for this week’s Your Moment of Ambition. Subscribe to Komal’s newsletter to get these articles straight to your inbox Tuesday’s at 9 am, or join us here on Medium weekly.

To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here.